Partners in slime: The liquid and the viscous in Sarraute and Sartre

Romanic Review, May 2001 by Willging, Jennifer

No discussion of the slimy in Sartre would be complete without reference to Marjery L. Collins's and Christine Pierce's important article, "Holes and Slime: Sexism in Sartre's Psychoanalysis," in which the authors are first to point out and object to Sartre's association of the slimy, contingent en-soi with (cultural) femininity and even, they argue, with (biological) femaleness. "Sartre's analysis of slime," Collins and Pierce state,

leaves him in an ambiguous position at best, for what emerges here is a traditional concept of the feminine, a sweet, clinging, dependent threat to male freedom. Like his predecessors Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Sartre identifies his concept of femininity with female and rails against these qualities in women as if they were natural characteristics, evidence of a given nature. (117-18)

While in recent volumes such as Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Paul Sartre, some critics have tried to rehabilitate Sartre's reputation among feminists and to salvage from his ontology what can be useful to feminist theory, others still answer the question, "L'existentialisme est-il un feminisme?" with a resounding no (Leon).

However one chooses to interpret it, an association most definitely exists in Sartre's work between women (whether as biologically or culturally produced creatures) and slime. The mode of being of the viscous, Sartre writes in L'Etre, "est une activite molle, baveuse et feminine d'aspiration ... il m'attire en lui comme le fond d'un precipice pourrait m'attirer" (655). The allusion to heterosexual intercourse is evident. "Le visqueux," he goes on to say, "c'est la revanche de l'en-soi. Revanche douceatre et feminine qui se symbolisera sur un autre plan par la qualite de sucre" (656 author's emphasis). Like the jilted mistress, the slimy refuses to be cast aside and clings alarmingly to her indifferent master. Not only does woman's character but also her body recall the slimy for Sartre, as when, again in L'Etre, he likens the slow dripping of honey (a prototypically viscous and therefore disgusting substance) from a spoon and its "melting" back into the honey still contained in the jar to "l'etalement, le raplatissement des seins un peu murs d'une femme qui s'etend sur le dos" (654). In a disturbing passage in La Nausee in which Roquentin becomes sexually aroused when reading a newspaper article about the rape and murder of a little girl, female genitalia are unambiguously identified with slimy, sinister existence:

entrer dans l'existence de l'autre, dans les muqueuses rouges a la lourde, douce, douce odeur d'existence, me sentir exister entre les douces levres mouillees, les levres rouges de sang pale, les levres palpitantes qui baillent toutes mouillees d'existence, toutes mouillees d'un pus clair, entre les levres mouillees sucrees qui larmoient comme des yeux. (148)

Although Roquentin also perceives the soft, sickening existence of his own body here-"Mon corps de chair qui vit, la chair qui grouille et tourne doucement liqueurs, qui tourne creme ..." (148)-these feelings are only provoked by the imagined engulfment in a beckoning but threatening female chasm ("me sentir exister entre les douces levres mouillees"). After all, his own male sex is hard ("beau et dur comme de l'acier," he might say) until the slimy feminine lips suck from it its vitality. In La Nausee there is also the frequently quoted passage in which Roquentin dreams that the sex of the woman with whom he has just had intercourse is a thick garden crawling with insects and crabs and imbued with vomit (90-1). Janette Bayles argues that in this novel, Roquentin's encounters with women and a feminized nature "are suffused with overtones of what Julia Kristeva has termed abjection, that is, a mixed reaction of fascinated horror elicited by the imminent transgression or collapse of the boundaries of the self" (1-2).7 In other words, in vulnerable moments when the Sartrean subject feels he is losing his "shell," so to speak, he is particularly susceptible to the clinginess of the slimy which recalls to him the soft clinginess of the mother before his separation from her and his entry into the hard, Symbolic world of language. While on some level the Sartrean subject longs for this reunion, as John Phillips (in a text to which I will refer again below) argues the Sarrautean subject does, he must in the end overcome this fascination and reject the slimy if he is to transcend the (feminine) en-soi and assert his primacy and independence as the (masculine) pour-soi.